Can Twitter Enhance Food Resilience?: Exploring Community Use of Twitter using Communicative Ecology

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Abstract

Food resilience - providing affordable access to a nutritionally balanced food supply - is a major sustainability challenge for growing urban populations worldwide, particularly in the developing world. This paper reports the use of Twitter for building urban food resilience through a case study of an urban agriculture community in Indonesia. A rule-guided qualitative content analysis is used to interpret meaning from digital text data and to bring methodological strength of quantitative analysis. In this study, communicative ecology theory is used to frame our understanding of the emerging themes in terms of topic of tweets, intention of tweets, and parties involved in the communication. We found that support for participation in urban agriculture is the most dominant content of communication and extending reach is the common intention of tweets while internal community networks are the most visible parties involved.